SECTION TWO - TEACHINGS ON MEDITATION - Part 6

"He for Whom the whole world waits has said that whatsoever shall be asked in His Name and with faith in the response will see it accomplished."

Remember at the same time that "faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." Then add:

"I ask for the needed money for . . . . . . and can demand it because

`From the Centre which we call the race of men

Let the Plan of Love and Light work out.

And may it seal the door where evil dwells.'"

5. Close with a careful consideration of your own responsibility to the Plan, and each week plan your financial cooperation with the Hierarchy. Be practical and realistic and know that if you do not give, you may not ask, for you have no right to evoke that which you do not share.

Suggestions:

1. This meditation is so simple that many of you may regard it as innocuous and perhaps futile. Used by many simultaneously, it may shatter the impasse which [231] at present prevents adequate funds pouring into the work which the Hierarchy seeks to accomplish.

2. Do this meditation every Sunday morning. Take what you have saved during the previous week and dedicate it to the work and present it in meditation to the Christ and His Hierarchy. Whether the sum is large or small, it can become an attractive and magnetic unit in the Masters' plans.

3. Realise the occult Law that "to those who give shall be given" so that they can give again.

4. Attempt to feel true love sweeping through you, and have the fixed intention to express this love to all you contact. It is the great attractive and selfless agent in world affairs.

PART XIV

In my last series of instructions I gave you a group meditation which was based upon the furthering of the work of the New Group of World Servers, as they sought to prepare humanity for the reappearance of the Christ. That preparatory work is the major incentive lying back of all that I do, and was the prime reason for the formation of the group in the early part of this century. Pioneers of this group appeared in the nineteenth century but the organisation, as it now exists, is of relatively modern days.

In this instruction we will consider the relation of group meditation to the work of the New Group of World Servers, and the necessity of establishing in the world a united world group, given to unanimous and simultaneous meditation upon the work of preparing the world for the new order and for the jurisdiction of the Christ (if I may use such a phrase).

It is necessary for you all to get a wider vision of the enterprise which this group has undertaken, or else the meditation work which you will do will hinder and not help. The task of the group of World Servers is not the spreading of esoteric or occult information. In preparing the world of [232] men for the reappearance of the Christ, the needs of all the many grades in the social order must be met; world groups of every description have to be contacted. Much of the work to be done, therefore, will be purely economic and will concern the right feeding and the development of a true security for millions who—for many lives—will not be interested in matters esoteric. The reform of the churches of the many world religions is another aspect of the same work, requiring no occult information but the introduction of commonsense and progressive ideas into theology, and the shift of the ecclesiastical emphasis from material values to the spiritual. The political regimes of the world need orienting to each other; it has never been the divine plan that all nations and races should conform to some standard political ideology or be reduced to a uniform general form of government. Nations differ; they have different cultures and traditions; they can function adequately under varying and distinctive governments; nevertheless, they can at the same time attain a unity of purpose, based upon a genuine desire for the true welfare and progress of all men everywhere.

In all these spheres of human thought and activity, the New Group of World Servers are playing a prominent part. At the very heart of that worldwide group are those who are in the Ashrams of the Masters—as are some of you—or on the periphery or within the sphere of influence of these Ashrams. Their task is largely a meditative one, carried on in order to influence the minds of those members of the group who are not yet in touch with any Ashram; they work thus from humanitarian, interested and basically ray reasons, and all such members are more or less under the control of their soul ray; this affects most definitely the varying fields of service. These are the areas of thought within the human family wherein the preparation for the coming of the Christ must be carried forward; but this activity is not, as a rule, associated with the esoteric angle or approach to truth but strictly with the angle of the betterment of human relationships. The Christ Himself (two thousand years ago) tried to demonstrate this mode of helpful activity; He kept the esoteric teaching for the few, the very few, who could approach [233] understanding, but He dealt with the masses from the angle of commonsense and physical plane helpfulness. Have this ever in mind.

I have been for some time seeking to impress upon you the eternal fact that the entire universe has been created and its evolution processed through the power of thought, which is only another word for controlled meditation. This covers the combined meditation of numerous subjective, spiritual and mental groups; the laws of this meditative work are the result of certain mental determinations, which embody the will of the planetary Logos and are imposed upon all lesser groups of lives by Those Whose task it is to wield the divine laws and enforce them. Freedom of the will is here to be noted in relation to the Time concept but not in relation to the final and inevitable divine results at the end of the immense world period. The major thoughtform of the spiritual Hierarchy, created by joint ashramic meditation, is called by us the Plan. The basic purpose of Sanat Kumara is revealed from cycle to cycle by His Agents in Shamballa, and is by Them impressed upon the minds of the senior Members of the Hierarchy. They, in Their turn, make this impression the subject of Their ashramic meditation, adapting its various concepts and the outlined purpose to a most carefully formulated Plan, presenting—as far as humanity is concerned—seven aspects or phases of evolutionary development and endeavour, according to the work desired of any Ray Ashram implicated at any particular time. Each Ashram thus undertakes meditation upon the general Plan and thus (if you could but realise it) each initiate and disciple finds his place and sphere of activity and service—from the very highest initiate to the least important disciple.

You might here ask: What is the value of the meditation and contribution of a new disciple, unaccustomed to ashramic patterns of thought and unable to carry much weight in the general group meditation? That is a questioning worth answering and of great encouragement to the neophyte. The various grades and ranks of initiates and disciples are so constituted that the result of their meditation upon the Plan is that the many needs of the varying masses of humanity (from [234] those of the advanced intelligentsia down to those of the unskilled labourer) can be adequately met and the great mass of men swung accurately into line with evolutionary purpose.

Have you ever stopped to think that the meditation of a Master upon the Plan of which He is custodian, and His formulation of what He can do along the line of effective cooperation, is of no service or usefulness to the illiterate inhabitants of our great cities and agricultural areas? The need of these unthinking masses must be met by disciples of less spiritual development, and probably their greatest appeal is through the application of economic help; the task of these lesser disciples is to prove to the ignorant masses that—as the centuries slip away—spiritual living and true spiritual understanding include every aspect of physical plane expression and not simply the religious or the philosophic modes of thought. The meditation, therefore, of every grade of disciple and initiate has its use, for by their meditation (carried forward on their own level) they can adapt the Plan to the widely differing masses and thus the hierarchical Plan can reach from the Masters of the Hierarchy, through the Ashrams to the New Group of World Servers, and thus to the whole of the human family. I would like you to grasp the true simplicity of this picture, if you can, for you can have a share also in this great meditative task.

One of the things which I set myself to achieve when I undertook this work of making the Plan clearer to the minds of men, and thus preparing the way for the Master of all the Masters, was to prove not only that the Plan was based upon planetary meditation but that, in its progress towards expression, it met the need of all possible groups and grades of human beings; and that—more important still—it could be proved that the word "spiritual" covered every phase of living experience. Ponder on this statement. That is spiritual which lies beyond the point of present achievement; it is that which embodies the vision and which urges the man on towards a goal higher than the one attained. The ecclesiastics of the world have made a great line of demarcation between what is human and what is spiritual, between what is material and what is not; in so doing they have created sin and [235] greatly complicated human living and understanding. They have given a selfish import to human aspiration; they have not taught mankind that meditation and prayer were simply phases of cooperation with the divine Plan. Individualism was fostered and group understanding was lost. Maybe—owing to the work of the Brothers of Darkness—there was no way to avoid this dangerous sidetracking of human intent and truth. But the time has now come when the great rhythm of meditation, ranging from desire through prayer to worship, and from thence to meditation and invocation, can be imposed by men upon their own thinking.

This is the immediate task of the New Group of World Servers, cooperating everywhere with the men of goodwill; each member of the New Group has to ascertain for himself where he stands, where his meditative responsibility lies and in what field destiny indicates his service to the race of men must be found. This is no easy task, brother of mine. Men are frequently so spiritually ambitious and waste their time in doing that which is not their destined task because in so doing they satisfy their spiritual pride.

You must learn to give a wider connotation to the word "meditation" than you have hitherto given. Concentrated thought is part of the planetary meditation; planning with care for the helping of the needy and pursuing all avenues of thinking to make that plan useful and effective is meditation; laying oneself open to spiritual impression and thus to cooperation with the Hierarchy is meditation; in this enumeration of meditative possibilities I have not touched upon the major creative meditation which is responsible for the evolutionary process and the controlled moving forward of all the world of forms into greater glory and light.

The work hitherto done in such occult groups as the Arcane School and others, as they teach meditation, has been nothing but the learning of a needed concentration. Only in the meditation work of the fourth degree has some of the creative work become possible and that in its most elementary stages; yet the Arcane School leads the aspirants of the world in meditation of an occult nature, thought not in any way a mystical nature. The mystical type of meditation [236] is of ancient formulation and its use indicates the next step for the masses of men; the practice of mystical meditation is not that which should be followed by aspirants and disciples who seek to work in an Ashram in cooperation with the Plan and under the guidance of a Master.

Meditation only becomes effective creatively and on all the three planes in the three worlds when the antahkarana is in process of construction. The worlds of the personality are the worlds of the third divine aspect and the creation of thoughtforms therein (as usually carried forward by the concrete mind) is related to form, to the acquisition of that which is desired and dedicated largely to the material values. But when a man is beginning to function as a soul-infused personality and is occupied with the task of rendering himself sensitive to the higher spiritual impression, then the creative work of the Spiritual Triad can be developed and a higher form of creative meditation can be employed. It is a form which each person has to find and discover for himself, because it must be the expression of his own spiritual understanding, initiated by a conscious construction or creation of the antahkarana and subject to impression from the Ashram with which he may be affiliated.

Earlier in this instruction I used the words: "An united world group given to unanimous and simultaneous meditation ... for the jurisdiction of the Christ." I particularly want to call your attention to this last phrase which introduces a new concept into the preparatory work to be done by the New Group of World Servers. The task is, through meditation, to establish the knowledge of and the functioning of those laws and principles which will control the coming era, the new civilisation and the future world culture. Until the foundation for the coming "jurisdiction" is at least laid, the Christ cannot reappear; if He came without this due preparation, much time, effort and spiritual energy would be lost. Therefore, we must assume (if these premises are accepted) that there must be organised—in the near future—a group of men and women in every country who, under due and proper organisation, will "simultaneously and unanimously" meditate upon those juridical measures and those basic laws [237] upon which the rule of Christ will be founded and which are essentially the laws of the Kingdom of God, the fifth kingdom in the evolutionary and natural processes of planetary unfoldment.

So much has been discussed in relation to these laws from the mystical and strictly Christian angle that the terms used are essentially meaningless; the whole subject requires revitalising; it needs to be endowed with a fresh and new presentation and a new terminology, more suited to the growing mental grasp of the scientific and modern mind. There has been endless talk about Brotherhood and the establishing of the principle that we are all the children of God, and this has done little to change men's approach to each other and to the shared human problems.

The New Group of World Servers will talk in other terms and their emphasis will be upon:

1. The Law of Right Human Relations.

2. The Principle of Goodwill.

3. The Law of Group Endeavour.

4. The Principle of Unanimity.

5. The Law of Spiritual Approach.

6. The Principle of Essential Divinity.

If you will study the many books which I have written, you will discover that they have been basically occupied with the rules which govern the ability to do group work—which is the work to which the Hierarchy is eternally committed. I have given you the Rules for Disciples in A Treatise on White Magic, the Rules for Aspirants in Initiation, Human and Solar, the Rules for Disciples and Initiates in A Treatise on the Seven Rays, Volume V. In other volumes you will find the Rules for Group Work; all these rules are, in essence, modes of conduct which, when imposed upon, impressed upon and followed up by an aspirant, will enable him to reach an understanding of spiritual law and of the nature of the Kingdom of God. All these are preparatory to the establishing of the new dispensation on Earth.

I would also call your attention to the words "unanimous [238] and simultaneous" meditation; they are not idly chosen. A situation which is unanimous is not one which is—from the spiritual angle—imposed. It is in the nature of a spontaneous mutual reaction—a reaction which is evoked by the immediate response of a soul, in touch with its personality, to a spiritual truth or intuition, and from this there is no lower mind escape. The concept of unanimity which has been presented by Soviet Russia runs completely counter to the truth. Their idea is that the concept, the idea, the decision and the interpretation of a group of powerful men establishes the truth, and to this truth the docile masses render prompt allegiance. This is a basic misconception and to it no member of the New Group of World Servers will render homage; they will fight this imprisonment of the human soul to the last gasp. True unanimity is free decision in response to a presentation of truth which is as near the achieved reality as possible. Therefore, it is in the enunciation of truth that security for all men lies. This necessarily involves a deeply spiritual presentation of essential facts. The principle of simultaneity is allied to this, for a mutual recognition of an identical approach to truth renders inevitably activity in unison.

The whole point, brother of mine, is that in both connections the incentive towards activity lies with the individual and there is no imposing authority. The only authority recognised is the truth as it emerges in the human consciousness, in any world or historical cycle. Today more truth is being recognised (and incidentally, repudiated) than at any other time in human history. Men have attained the point in evolution where they are able to know the truth if and when presented, because the concrete human mind is now more highly responsive to abstract truth, and therefore to the next evolutionary presentation. It is this which the Totalitarian Powers, the unconscious (and I mean that, brother of mine) agents of the Black Lodge are fighting; they will not win; in the long run they cannot, for the human spirit is eternally sound and sane.

I would have you consider these suggestions with care and thus prepare yourselves for an elucidation of the spiritual [239] laws and principles, as themes for meditation. I herein present to you six themes for group meditation; this is essentially your next consideration if the "unanimous and simultaneous" meditation which can be immediately effective is organised and developed.